Group decision-making is a process for maintaining social cohesion while negotiating collective responses to changing conditions. Large-scale, multifaceted collective decision-making and delegation of responsibility can be important to both democratic governance and commercial enterprise. Meanwhile, smaller, simpler decisions, such as those among family or friends, are pervasive. These include decisions such as where and when to meet for dinner and which movie to see together. Although the factors involved in these decisions are often more limited and the decision process itself is usually informal, small groups still frequently fail to reach satisfactory agreements easily.
Group members may struggle to share their personal inclinations in competitions for group attention, where some voices and personalities in the group dominate and others are muted; consequently, the group must work with information that may be incomplete and distorted by social factors, such as peer pressure and disincentives to be critical. If participant preferences for a set of options presented with equal salience were quantified directly and automatically, individual inclinations could be better aggregated into an egalitarian collective choice. State of the art electronic communication tools, which are not designed and specialized for group decision-making, typically aspire to a high-bandwidth reduplication of face-to-face interaction; however, such systems do not necessarily bring a group closer to reaching fully representative group decisions.
Communication tools, including email and text messaging, allow all participants in the group to share options and preferences, but piecing together an organized picture from a freeform, linear stream of information produced by such tools can be challenging. In some cases, group attention can resemble a baton passed about chaotically, leaving a record to which not everyone in the group has an incentive to attend to fully. A group member's relative preference may be ambiguous, gleaned only from the tone and voice of that group member's writing. Furthermore, early comments can disproportionately anchor and bias later responses.
In many cases, polling may offer greater clarity and can reduce the relative importance of written responses. Each vote may count equally, whether it comes near the beginning or end of the decision-making process. Traditional polling presents preset options that cannot be altered by the people polled. Such polling still lacks finality; nothing short of consensus definitively implies a group decision in such a poll.
To conclude deliberation, both communication tools and polls essentially rely on some member to ask, “Are we there yet?” Whether or not an informal move to close a poll comes at a reasonable point during the process, the group must branch the decision to close the poll as a separate group decision before affirming or returning to the poll's main topic(s) of consideration. Uncertainty about when enough options and preferences have been collected results in messy endings that typically rely on an informally designated or self-appointed leader (a group member who subjectively integrates preferences and terminates the process).